Category Archives for Information Marketing

Editor’s note: Jay Acunzo is the author of the new book Break the Wheel, which explores how the world’s best creators break from conventional thinking to think for themselves. He’s a former digital media strategist at Google, head of content at HubSpot, and VP of brand at the seed VC, NextView.

The deep tones of synth music begins to play. A crackling sound emerges, as if from static electricity, followed by a single strum from an electric guitar that shatters the silence. A man’s voice booms.

“I really didn’t get fascinated with design until I learned what it was and what it could actually do.”

These are the opening moments of InVision’s “Design Disruptors,” a now-famous film within the design community. This hour-long video features some of the biggest and brightest names in software design today, hailing from companies like Google, Lyft, Netflix, Dropbox, and more. The film launched in the summer of 2016, and although it was never aired online (the company debuted the film in 1,500 offline screenings worldwide), “Design Disruptors” helped InVision generate more than 70,000 leads and double its user base in a single year, according to sources within the firm.

While this may seem like an outlier project, it’s become part of a larger marketing trend we’re seeing proliferate around the tech world today: marketers creating films and shows. Why?

“Optimistically, I’d hope it’s because marketers are realizing that impressions and pageviews are BS metrics, and it’s a lot more valuable to get a smaller group of consumers hooked on a show that they’ll watch for a really long time,” said Joe Lazauskas, executive editor and head of content strategy at the marketing tech firm Contently. A journalist by background, Lazauskas now consults clients like Microsoft, IBM, and Autodesk for Contently, and while he clings to his optimism, he knows there’s a downside to any trend. “Pessimistically, I’d say that it’s because marketers still fall in love with big vanity projects without much thought to the return on investment.”

So what’s causing this trend, anyway?

Ultimately, Lazauskas concludes that the rise in branded shows is a combination of both his optimistic and pessimistic views. On the one hand, films and series are indeed strategic for some companies, enabling them to reap certain rewards that disparate pieces of content can’t provide. On the other hand, plenty of companies continue to glom onto the trend because, well, “it’s a thing.” Those in the former group, however, have identified a fundamental shift currently affecting how companies go to market. Most of us talk about the industry’s reaction to that shift: things like content marketing, influencer marketing, and similar experience-based approaches. The shift itself, though, is far more revealing. You see, the marketing mandate has changed. The goal is no longer to acquire attention. The goal is to hold it.

It used to be sufficient for marketers to describe the value of their products in a few disconnected interruptions. Marketers would leap out in front of the content a consumer actually wanted to consume in order to grab just a few seconds of their attention and deliver the right message, with the right promotion, at the right time. Of course, we all know what happened to that old marketing playbook: (insert mushroom cloud GIF). Along came the internet. Buyers of both B2C and B2B products now face seemingly infinite choice, from content to competing products, all accessible on multiple screens, whenever and wherever they want it. Additionally, technologies whose sole purpose is to block advertising signal a larger trend: As consumers, we don’t want to be interrupted. We control what we consume because we have all the choice, and we only choose experiences that create value in our lives, like content–not advertisements, which are messages that merely describe value. (I’m painting with broad strokes, but we’re all part of the technorati after all.)

If you’re a marketer today, and you’re stuck in acquisition mode, it’s like digging a hole in dry sand. Nothing you do sticks. The very best in our world are winning on customer experience, not brute-forcing their way into customers’ lives. We need to embrace the new marketing mandate: The job isn’t to acquire attention. The job is to hold it.

“If you’re willing to make the investment in some serialized, engaging content, rather than a bunch of disconnected pieces, you can start thinking in terms of hours spent with your company as opposed to ideas like impressions,” said Dan Mills, creative director at video software company Wistia. This fall, the company announced a new documentary series called “One, Ten, One Hundred,” a partnership with video agency Sandwich, which boasts clients like Facebook, Slack, Uber, and Square. The series explores the effects of constraints on creativity when creating videos.

Said Wistia’s cofounder and CEO, Chris Savage, “What’s interesting about a more substantial project like this is that instead of just moving on to the next piece of content to push out the door, we have the time and space to really invest in exploring all of the different angles and nuances of this complex topic.” First, the company asked Sandwich to create three videos to promote the same Wistia product (a Chrome extension called Soapbox): One ad for $1,000, one for $10,000, and one for $100,000 (hence the name “One, Ten, One Hundred”). Those videos launched in mid-September. In October, Wistia will release a four-part documentary series going behind-the-scenes of the entire process to examine exactly how changes in budget alter the quality of the videos. They believe that budget is a major reason why more marketing teams don’t prioritize video (and thus, buy Wistia). More specifically, they believe this is a perception problem and that teams don’t really need more money to create better videos in most cases. But it’s a messy subject.

“A blog post or a two minute video just wasn’t going to cut it,” Savage said. “We wanted to create something that was deeper and lasting. The most valuable thing that we learned through this process, and what we explore in “One, Ten, One Hundred,” is the complex relationship between money and creativity.”

InVision’s CEO and cofounder, Clark Valberg, seems to agree that holding significant audience attention means focusing on depth, not breadth. Like Wistia, InVision used its documentary, “Design Disruptors,” as well as its newer film with IBM called “The Loop,” to illuminate a large problem facing designers in their work and to rally the community around their brand to solve it. For Wistia, their customers struggle with budget. At InVision, they realized that product designers wanted a better sense of identity as a profession, as well as a seat at the proverbial table.

“We went out and talked to our best customers,” he said. “They had a lot more to tell us than just what they were doing with our products. There was a movement [in the field of product design], and they all felt it. They all understood their role within the company and their company’s role in the formation of this new market called digital product design. It was evolving here and now, and they had a lot to say about it.”

Wistia and InVision are not alone in creating shows and trying to spark movements in doing so. Other companies creating video series include Fuze, which will partner with CBS to create a new series about tech later this year, and LinkedIn’s sales and marketing solutions team, which debuted “B2B Dinner for Five” late last year. In audio, dozens of brands are breaking from the conventional wisdom of what a podcast has to sound like (namely, Q&A with experts) to create documentary series instead. These include Zendesk’s “Repeat Customer“ (created with the agency Pacific Content), Adobe’s upcoming “Wireframe” (Gimlet Media’s branded content studio Gimlet Creative), and “Exceptions,” a series exploring why high-growth SaaS companies are betting so heavily on brand marketing (which, full disclosure, I host and produce for my client Drift).

These companies all seek benefits from their shows that the usual marketing campaign or “piece” of content doesn’t offer. By holding attention for hours on end, shows develop a level of intimacy and trust similar to a one-on-one meeting that scales far better. Shows provide endless amounts of marketing efficiencies, too, allowing marketing teams to mine each episode for excerpts, lessons learned, and new ideas, all of which can fuel company blogs, newsletters, and social media profiles. At some point soon, I expect to see a brand-sponsored book with material pulled exclusively from their company’s show, there’s that much source material bottled up in episodes. Lastly, shows create customers through both word-of-mouth and thriving subscriber lists. After all, it’s far more powerful to say to a visitor, “Get the next episode,” than, “Subscribe for alerts” or “more of our content.”

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual report measuring consumer trust in big institutions like government and business, trust in companies continues to fall. To get any individual, let alone an entire audience, to spend 10, 30, or even 60 minutes with your company each week is more powerful than ever. But that’s the benefit these companies seek.

What would cause this trend to stick?

It’s hard to ignore Lazauskas’s pessimism about brands adopting this approach. After all, most companies barely know how to market a single blog post well, let alone build and promote an entire series. For example, in many B2B niches, competing shows feel like copycat programs. They’re all effectively “Talking Topics With Experts!” (If everyone claims to have the smartest show in a niche, does anyone?) Additionally, many shows lapse after a season or two, even after a public victory lap over their first few episodes. Slack’s “Work in Progress” hasn’t aired an episode since October 2017, despite being widely loved and even syndicated to satellite radio. But while Lazauskas hints at the potential negatives, Wistia’s Savage sees it differently. His company is investing heavily in serialized content, but he believes marketers need to shift how they track results to justify doing so.

“It starts with qualitative results: Are people talking about it, are they engaging and spending time with the content? Over a longer period of time, we expect to see that content like [“One, Ten, One Hundred”] brought in totally new and different audience that helps expand our customer base.” If most marketing focuses on reach with a broad group of people, then shows are all about resonance with the right people.

Additionally, as Clark Valberg of InVision told me, it has to be a “portfolio approach.” Brands shouldn’t aim to be purely Netflix any more than they should act exclusively like Don Draper in “Mad Men.” Some things are directly measurable, some things are not. Some marketing looks like a piece of content, some like a series. Finding the right mix for your business is what matters most.

Shows have long been a vehicle for holding attention, and marketers are finally catching up to what media companies realized long ago. Call it the Curse of Conventional Wisdom. As tech companies invent the future, marketers at those very same companies need to constantly question older norms and even the most tried-and-true best practice in order to keep up. After all, we may be at the start of something positive for companies and consumers alike—that is, if you’re optimistic.

“We definitely think this is the beginning of a trend,” said Savage. “It’s clear that companies are making investments in engaging their audiences with things like podcasts. We see video series content and storytelling as the next logical step for companies to connect at a deeper level.”

I’ve been a content marketer for a decade now, which makes me a grizzled vet in a relatively new career path. (In marketing, “grizzled vet” is code for “jaded as hell.”) But for once, I’m bullish on a trend. It’s not because the hype won’t fade. It will. But, refreshingly, this is an approach to marketing that can’t be gamed. When the goal is to hold attention, not merely acquire it, there’s no faking it. You have to earn that level of attention. Trust, influence, and hours of someone’s time aren’t things you can purchase or hack. Eventually, this wave will go out, and all who will be left will be companies like InVision and Wistia who truly dug into the ground, with real foundations of creativity and customer-focus. Those merely riding the wave will be washed away. When it comes to holding long periods of our attention, the hucksters and system-gamers have no power. Because fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice—can’t get fooled again.

From humble beginnings as a simple Facebook group I posted in September 2015, Techfugees has come a long way. It was conceived as a vehicle to enthuse technologists about the plight of refugees by waking them up to the idea that their innovation, startup mentality and design-led thinking could potentially bring new, scalable new solutions to the plight of displaced people. Today, Techfugees is an international non-profit with its own CEO, Joséphine Goube and a team based between London and Paris. Not bad for a handful of posts on social media…

What’s fascinating about the project as it’s developed is that, at the time, it was considered quite radical, perhaps even odd, to bring tech people into the equation. But simply watching the footage of refugees clutching smartphones as they fled war-torn regions and natural disasters made the tech world realize it can be part of the solution to many of the seemingly intractable problems refugees face.

Techfugees has grown into a community of around 18,000 innovators all over the world, supporting by way of their own projects or companies, via social media and taking part in hundreds of dedicated events around the world. This includes more than 30 hackathons and an annual Global Summit, the second of which happened over the last two days in Paris. The Summit had over 500 participants, such as social entrepreneurs, engineers, designers, humanitarians, policymakers, researchers or impact investors, a large number of whom who have a refugee background. Speakers discussed and debate the different uses of technology for displaced people during the time of migration until arrival to their new host societies.

The impact of climate change will cause the migration of 143 million people by 2050

This year’s program looked at four main topics: Access to Rights and Information; Data Ethics; Social Inclusion; and Climate Migration. The last issue is now of even greater urgency in 2018. According to a study by the World Bank published earlier this year, the impact of climate change will cause the migration of 143 million people by 2050, bringing with it looming humanitarian challenges.

Just like at your typical tech startup conference, Techfugees has a similar programme: The Techfugees Global Challenges Competition. This showcases projects responding to the needs of displaced populations and building technological products or services for them, based on Techfugees’ 8 guiding principles and addressing one of Techfugees’ five focus area: access to rights and information, health, education, employment and social inclusion. The applications went through an international Jury of experts who selected the 25 finalists from hundreds of applications, from 52 countries across the world, which pitched their project in front of an international Jury and Summit attendees.

“Integreat is an information app and website tailored to the specific needs of both newcomers as the users of the app and municipal administrations as the content providers. It’s a mobile guide for newcomers. Multilingual. Offline. Free. Can we provide the people arriving in our city with all relevant information in their native language as quickly as possible? Even without internet access and without confusing red tape? The result is an app called Integreat which passes on all relevant information in multiple languages to the newcomers. It is a holistic service ecosystem for cities, districts and organizations for the integration of people with a flight or migration background.”

Shifra Australia / USA “Shifra is not only a life-saving mHealth intervention, it is also a research project which aims to explore the social, cultural and geographic barriers to quality healthcare access many refugees experience, as cited by the refugees themselves. The Shifra web app is designed to improve access to quality sexual and reproductive health care. It provides local, evidence-based health information in multiple languages for communities with varying levels of language and health literacy. Shifra also directs users to trusted clinics where they can access respectful and safe care. We work with local health networks to improve their existing services based on the self-identified health needs found in Shifra’s anonymous user trend data.”

Antura and the Letters (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt) “Antura and the Letters is an engaging mobile game that helps Syrian children learn how to read in Arabic and improve their psychosocial well-being. Considering that most refugees have old smartphones and connectivity is always a challenge for them, the game runs on old devices (from 2010/2011), it’s very small to download (less than 80Mb on Android) and it does not require internet connection. Antura and the Letters is completely free and open source… and it has been designed in order to be easily adaptable to other languages! That’s exactly what we want to do next with the goal to reach and help as many children as possible around the world.”

TaQadam (Lebanon) “In the era of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the data workers and annotators are the new programmers. From robots, drones, self-driving cars or e-commerce, the markets need for vision technology for artificial intelligence is extraordinary. One of the major building blocks of such AI-powered recognition systems is image annotation delivered with a human input – data training. Today’s data is driving tomorrow’s AI products. To be competitive in AI, innovation depends on having data-edge often more than a technology-edge, but 80% of data engineers’ time is spent on sourcing and preparing quality image data for AI models. TaQadam optimizes image annotation for data-driven companies with visual AI and delivers on-demand, vertical-specific, high-quality image annotation. With an API and a cloud architecture, we ensure a simple and secure way to build image data set with a high accuracy and precision, while simplifying the process of sourcing human insights from dedicated and trained teams of TaQadam. TaQadam is a unique service on the market that brings a specialized on use case teams that are building AI together with the client. With gamification and mobile accessible work on TaQadam Android App, we transform the experience of annotation to fit the younger generations. We create work of the future: accessible, flexible, allowing fluidity, community building and fun.”

Refugees Are (Worldwide) “Refugees Are map the public opinion around refugees in the news by: 1- Extracting daily news related to refugees from GDELT (open source news dataset) 2- Extracting location from the article 3- Applying sentiment analysis to classify it as positive, negative or neutral article 4- Extracting topics related to refugees using LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) 5- Extracting most common words occurring with refugees 6- Visualizing it in an easy way for the public to understand 7- Let the public help identify negative news around refugees”

And finally The Mohajer App won a special jury prize for its outstanding work assisting Afghan refugees in Iran in incredibly difficult circumstances:

The Mohajer AppAndroid / IOS Iran, US, Canada and UK “The Mohajer App was created with the support of Afghan communities inside Iran to address their needs. The app was completed with a group of paid and voluntary refugee-rights attorneys, advocates and technologists. Mohajer has two features: – The “Get Informed” section provides information for users concerning Iran’s immigration policy, the rights of Afghans in Iran, and resources that are available for concerns such as health, education, combatting from discrimination and more; the list continues to expand as users share their needs. The section also provides a list of support groups that our team has verified directly. The “Submit Report” feature enables users to share their everyday experiences as Afghans in Iran and support the larger community in addressing challenges by sharing information on events and experiences. The information on the app is also accessible offline, so as to support those without regular internet access.”

Here’s a run down of the rest of the 25 that pitched, in their own words:

Challenge #1 – Access to rights & information

TikkTalk (Norway) “Tikk Talk is an open marketplace for interpretation services for everyone who is in need for interpretation assistance. So far the platform handles 80% of all assignments automatically, limiting the overhead costs which traditional agencies have. The platform also gives all parties full transparency which empowers them to make better decisions. Because of the tech, interpreters are in the forefront deciding on their wage and which assignments they would like to take. Before, Helse Førde (Hospital partner) switched to TikkTalk they only received 24% qualified interpreters now they receive 99% qualified interpreters.”

“Refugee Info Bus’s mission is simple. Operating at the frontlines of Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis, we provide good quality multilingual legal information and free Wifi to refugees on the move in, or having just arrived, in Northern France and in Greece. Our first Refugee Info Bus began life as an old horsebox, purchased, stripped-out, cleaned-up, and converted into a mobile office and Wi-Fi hotspot for refugees and asylum seekers living in northern France. Within a year, we facilitated over 91,000 Wi-Fi logins and delivered more than 1,000 workshops to 50,000+ individuals on the UK and French asylum systems.”

“In mid-2016, Refugee.Info pivoted to focus on social media to better serve the needs and preferences of users, which had drastically changed after borders closed in Europe in March of that year. Refugee.info hired local journalists to obtain and verify news and other up-to-date information about the context, as well as content professionals to optimize the information for social media, applying private sector content marketing principles to increase ROI. Now, refugees in Greece, Italy and the Balkans can message the page and receive a quick answer from a moderator who will work with the journalists and lawyers to provide accurate information, often sourced from their website or blog.”

Challenge #2 – Health

Connect 2 Drs Mexico The platform of Connect2Drs was initially built to strive the private sector as a target market, and it still is. However, with the injustice and lack of a good health insurance for mexicans – deported or refugees – people with disabilities and people who need medical attention at home with palliatives became their main goal.

Doctor-X Jordan “Doctor-X is a multi-language medical history mobile application and website with, for each refugee, a private account that the doctor can update when he does an operation on the refugee, in the language the doctor speaks. The program will make it available in 5 languages in case the refugee goes to a new country and needs medical help.”

Iryo Jordan “Until now, medical workers in camps used Excel spreadsheets to make notes about patients. On top of that, medical workforce turnover is high, bringing additional confusion and inconsistency to Excel records. Iryo enables accurate medical history recording. Because data storage is decentralized with a copy on a local server, a second one on the patients mobile phone and a third one in the Iryo cloud, even if a patient arrives at a new refugee camp where the Iryo system is already in place, the doctor there will be able to access the patient’s record.”

MedShr UK/Worldwide “MedShr has been developed to enable doctors and healthcare professionals to share and discuss clinical cases for peer-to-peer learning and medical education. It is a private, professional, verified network for clinical case discussion between medical professionals. No patient information is visible, all cases are anonymous and members can use the mobile app to get consent from patients to share images. Beyond that, all images and media are securely cloud stored with no images stored on the user’s device. Importantly, MedShr members are also able determine who can see and discuss their cases.”

Challenge #3 – Education

edSeed (United States, Gaza, Lebanon) “Edseed is about narrating stories of youth and bringing them closer to donors in the USA; participating in networking; and building a network for higher education of refugees to address policy issues, mentor students.”

Paper Airplanes (United States / Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, KSA, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine) “Paper Airplanes (PA) is a nonprofit that uses video conferencing technology to provide free, peer-to-peer language and professional skills instruction to young adults and teens affected by conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. PA works to support these individuals to pursue their educational and employment goals and ultimately rebuild their lives. PA teaches English and Turkish to youth and adults, journalism to citizen journalists, and beginners’ coding skills to women. By using virtual communication technology to provide live instruction, PA is able to reach internally displaced and refugee youth as well as underserved populations who may be otherwise difficult to reach, including those inside Syria (approximately 50% of our students), young women and girls, and individuals in rural areas across the MENA region. Additionally, PA supplies computer tablets for select Youth Exchange Program participant recipients and scholarships to defray the cost of the IELTS and TOEFL exams for qualified PA graduates.”

Power.Coders (Switzerland) “Powercoders’ solution is to offer intensive computer programming classes to refugees over a three month period and then place them in an IT internship. As a result of the comprehensive training and subsequent placement, within a little less than a year our refugee graduates are exponentially better positioned to find and keep an IT job in Switzerland, and many do just that. The program is fully customized to address the challenges and issues that refugees may face when trying to integrate professionally and the courses enjoy an almost 100% internship placement success rate and subsequent 80% integration rate.”

RefgueeEd.Hub (Greece) RefugeeEd.Hub is an open source online database that promotes promising practice in refugee education globally. RefugeeEd.Hub aims to raise the quality of education for refugees and displaced people by generating knowledge and fostering collaboration among global and local stakeholders working to provide education to refugees. RefugeeEd.Hub will support education innovators, multilateral institutions, global development actors, education funders and government and policymakers to inform practice on the ground.

“Bitae Technologies aims to help global, mobile talent, like refugees and migrants, carry their skills and experience with them in a secure, verified digital CV, addressing the lack of access to formal education and employment faced by refugees and other vulnerable populations. Bitae transforms non-formal learning and achievements into opportunities for refugees. We provide a platform to track, store and verify refugees’ non-formal learning and skills, creating a “digital backpack” of classes, workshops, internships and skills that together, can help a refugee move forward with education and employment. Bitae leverages mobile and blockchain technology to ensure that governments, international organizations, NGOs, educational institutions and employers are able to document non-formal learning and skills in the most inclusive, secure and transparent way. The Digital Backpack focuses on four key functions: creating badges and verifying skills, requesting and sending references, skills matching and skills assessment. Using existing tools, the platform makes it possible to create blockchain-backed credential badges that can be stored and shared.”

Human in the loop Bulgaria – 2017 “Human in the Loop is a social enterprise which employs and trains refugees to provide image annotation services to computer vision companies. It is a niche market that currently requires manual human input in order to train ML models to recognize images in a way that a human would, and Human in the Loop is part of a growing community of “impact sourcing” enterprises that is dedicated to providing employment to vulnerable groups in this sector. The opportunity they are seizing is that image annotation is a very accessible type of labor that does not require previous education or professional skills, but which can open the door to more advanced tech jobs and freelancing skills, which are especially useful for migrants. In this way, they are empowering refugees to earn a living in a dignified way and gain skills, and they are turning them in “digital nomads” who are able to make use of the opportunities that remote digital work provides to people who are on the move. Human in the Loop works as an outsourcing business with B2B sales. Their clients are companies from the computer vision, self-driving cars, drones, and satellite imager industry, which are training machine learning models.”

Rafiqi (United Kingdom, Germany, Jordan) “Rafiqi is a matching tool that leverages artificial intelligence to connect refugees in real-time and in a customized way to the opportunities that are the most suitable to his/her profile and that would lead to lifelong employment. Currently, there is no single platform where resettled refugees can access and filter the wide range of opportunities available to them, including jobs, trainings, mentorships and degrees, and where any organization (company/NGO/university) can seamlessly access and filter refugee talent. Refugees lack of knowledge of opportunities and of the right opportunities is resulting in them being unemployed or being overqualified for what they are actually doing. Despite the existence of some refugee to jobs matching programs supported by governments and NGOs in countries like Germany and the Netherlands, these matchings remain largely manual and limited in terms of intelligence. These matching efforts cannot scale well given the high number of refugees and the diversity of their profiles, as well as the diversity of opportunities available to them.”

Transformify Rebuild Lives Program (Worldwide / EU, Iraq) “The Rebuild Lives Program by Transformify exists to provide access to jobs and secure payment to displaced people as well as access to targeted eLearning to improve their skills by using recruitment CRM leveraging HR-tech, fintech and AI to connect refugees with employers and provide access to secure payment even if the refugees have no permanent address or a bank account.”

Challenge #5 – Social inclusion

PLACE (France, Germany, United Kingdom) “PLACE runs Innovation Labs for migrants and refugees in Europe. These labs transform the people from migrants and refugees into Innovators – creators of solutions for European societies. The labs are 1 to 3-day immersive experiences that apply design thinking methodology to enable Innovators to identify problems, understand their users, develop solutions and then rapidly test and prototype these solutions with a diverse community of local stakeholders. Beyond the Labs, the Innovators have the opportunity to develop their projects through the network of the PLACE collective – actors in the private, public and civil society that see the value of diversity in migrant-led innovation and who want to be a part of it. In addition to innovative solutions, the labs also produce a new leadership model for Europe. Innovators who demonstrate motivation and willingness to take on a role as a leader in migrant-led innovation are trained to be PLACE Catalysts. The Catalysts are trained in interculturality, sourcing, public speaking, networking and lab facilitation. They are then given the opportunity to apply these learnings as facilitators in Labs throughout Europe.”

Register of Pledges (Ireland) “The Register of Pledges project workstream are: Humanitarian Database of Pledges (Accommodation, Goods and Services) administered by Red Cross with back-office capabilities for pledge management and workflow and reporting capabilities; Open-source version of the technology is available on Github, a humanitarian data capture system with APIs and a translation interface; Evolve and open-source our Case Management System, to optimize Service User outcomes.”

SchoolX (UK/Turkey) “SchoolX envision a shared economy model with volunteer teachers which include university students, educated refugees, retired teachers and other local volunteers, who will teach refugee students. Due to the challenge of limited access to education that these displaced people face, our solution is to recruit teachers within the refugee community and local community, and connect them with refugee students who are eager to learn. The talents of these teachers are then harnessed to deliver rigorous and certified education to the students. Through this, volunteers, including refugee teachers, will also receive an allowance for their efforts as well. The solution, in a form of an online platform, will provide training packages that involve not only fundamental tenets of teaching, but also pedagogical and psycho-social training for the volunteers to prepare them to approach refugee children in the most appropriate and empowering manner, The online platform will also serve as a database which will be utilized to match teachers and students based on their needs, skills, availability, and geographical proximity in order to arrange flexible, face-to-face lessons.”

SPEAK (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany) SPEAK is a crowdsourced language and culture exchange network, based on an Online2Offline model. All processes are managed online, through a platform developed in-house, while the learning and sharing experience happens offline, allowing participants to establish a close relationship with one another. This model ensures a greater efficiency and minimization of fixed costs, allowing SPEAK to be sustainable at scale while charging only a symbolic fee for its program. SPEAK empowers its participants by expanding their language and cultural skills, all the while becoming part of mutual support networks. Through a language and culture exchange, SPEAK connects migrants, refugees and locals living in the same city. In creating bridges between migrants and locals, members often help each other with job offers or renting their first house in a new city thanks to the power of SPEAK communities. These networks are home to a multicultural community, based on equality and where cultural heritage is validated. In other words, SPEAK’s networks nurture unity in diversity. SPEAK’s volunteer Buddy system empowers anyone with the willingness to share their language and culture, allowing for an “everyone a changemaker” attitude, which encourages an even greater participation in local public life. he sustainability of the initiative relies on the community and willingness to promote SPEAK’s values of an integrated and inclusive society.”

Early-stage venture capital firm Shasta Ventures has brought on three new faces to beef up its enterprise software and security portfolio amid a big push to “go deeper” into cybersecurity, per Shasta’s managing director Doug Pepper.

Balaji Yelamanchili (above left), the former general manager and executive vice president of Symantec’s enterprise security business unit, joins as a venture partner on the firm’s enterprise software team. He was previously a senior vice president at Oracle and Dell EMC. Pepper says Yelamanchili will be sourcing investments and may take board seats in “certain cases.”

The firm has also tapped Salesforce’s former chief information security officer Izak Mutlu (above center) as an executive-in-residence, a role in which he’ll advise Shasta portfolio companies. Mutlu spent 11 years at the cloud computing company managing IT security and compliance.

InterWest board partner Drew Harman, the final new hire, has joined as a board partner and will work closely with the chief executive officers of Shasta’s startups. Harman has worked in enterprise software for 25 years across a number of roles. He is currently on the boards of the cloud-based monetization platform Aria, enterprise content marketing startup NewsCred, customer retention software provider Totango and others.

“There’s no area today that’s more important than cybersecurity,” Pepper told TechCrunch. “The business of venture has gotten increasingly competitive and it demands more focus than ever before. We aren’t looking for generalists, we are looking for domain experts.”

Shasta’s security investments include email authentication service Valimail, which raised a $25 million Series B in May. Airspace Systems, a startup that built “kinetic capture” technologies that can identify offending unmanned aircrafts and take them down, raised a $20 million round with participation from Shasta in March. And four-year-old Stealth Security, a startup that defends companies from automated bot attacks, secured an $8 million investment from Shasta in February.

The Menlo Park-based firm filed to raise $300 million for its fifth flagship VC fund in 2016. A year later, it announced a specialty vehicle geared toward augmented and virtual reality app development. With more than $1 billion under management, the firm also backs consumer, IoT, robotics and space-tech companies across the U.S.

In the last year, Shasta has promoted Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Nitin Chopra and Jacob Mullins from associate to partner, as well as added two new associates, Natalie Sandman and Rachel Star.

Below-par subscriber numbers last week were bad news for a service that must keep growing to survive. How will it respond?

The rise of Netflix has torn up TV schedules and destabilised Hollywood, but last week it was the streaming service’s turn to be shaken. Shares in the maker of Stranger Things and The Crown suffered their biggest drop in two years on Monday after a surprising failure to hit subscriber targets.

A torrent of Netflix-produced content – 700 original TV shows and 80 films this year alone – has kept the fans rolling in and made Netflix a darling with investors. But last week’s figures revived doubts about the US company’s business model. Here are some of the challenges that Netflix must address if it is to sustain its $165bn (£127bn) valuation.

Subscriber growth

Netflix stock fell more than 14% in after-hours trading on Monday after the company missed subscriber growth forecasts for the second quarter by 1 million. The company still added 5.2 million new users globally, which, given its base of 130 million, hardly feels like a crisis. However, the Netflix investment case relies on remaining in constant high-growth mode, and that means continuing to be able to acquire new subscribers steadily, quarter after quarter. And that is getting tougher as the “easy” subscribers in the US and major western markets have mostly been converted.

“Netflix’s big challenge is maintaining growth worldwide while its customer base saturates in core western markets,” says Richard Broughton, analyst at Ampere. “Netflix is having to work ever harder to gain new subscribers.” The low-cost nature of the streaming service – a premium subscription costs £9.99 per month in the UK and $13.99 in the US – means that it needs inexorable growth to pay for its content. Must-watch shows and films beget happy customers and draw new subscribers, which helps pay for even more content. Netflix’s content budget is $8bn this year alone – it costs a lot of money to attract a Hollywood star such as Will Smith to a sci-fi film like Bright – and in recent years it has been raised by about $1bn annually. Netflix is stuck in a costly and precarious cycle.

Disney’s $71bn bid for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, which includes the studio behind films such as X-Men and Deadpool and TV shows such as The Simpsons, is a move to control crown-jewel content to supply its service and further starve Netflix.

In addition, although Netflix’s huge budgets – the first series of The Crown cost £100m – have opened up a new golden age of television, they have also stoked inflation for top on-screen and off-screen talent, with rising costs further fuelled by competition from Amazon and Apple. “Netflix has invested big and inflated the market for scripted drama, but this is classic unsustainable bubble territory,” says Tim Mulligan, analyst at MIDiA Research.

The BBC’s research found that more than 80% of children go to the Google-owned YouTube for on-demand content (half also go to Netflix). Last week, media regulator Ofcom revealed that 16- to 34-year-olds spend more time watching non-broadcast content – such as streaming services, catch-up and on-demand TV – than traditional scheduled TV. YouTube was again found to be the biggest winner, accounting for the highest proportion of non-broadcast viewing in the age group.

The BBC’s research found that children aged five to 15 spend more time each week online (15 hours and 18 minutes on average) than they do watching conventional or streamed TV (14 hours). All media is now in competition for attention, and online it is the Facebook-owned Instagram and Snapchat that are currently dominating the attention of younger generations.

Moving into sport and news

A key part of Netflix’s rapid growth is that it is cheap: the most popular £7.99-a-month package is seen by many as a bargain for access to such a vast range of content.

Some analysts believe that Netflix needs to develop its content offering and become more like traditional TV companies in order to become a “must-have” service. “Netflix is the TV disrupter that everyone is watching to see what they do next,” says Mulligan. “To move to the next level they need to add global news and sport to their content offer.”

Doing so would also justify the inevitable price rises that Netflix is having to introduce as it continues the race to cover its costs. The company is already experimenting in Europe with a high-definition “ultra” subscription, which costs €16.99-€19.99 a month in Germany and Italy. Traditional pay-TV companies such as Sky, which originally built its business on exclusive Premier League rights, charge up to £100 a month, though this also includes costs for landlines and broadband.

“Netflix’s long-term strategy is that it has to increase its revenue from subscribers; it needs to move into those content genres to replicate the journey of traditional pay-TV companies,” says Mulligan. “You need a full suite of content if you want to be a real substitute, not just an additive service.”

The total shortfall of more than a million may not appear to be a big deal for a streaming service whose subscriber numbers have now past than 130 million globally and whose share price has soared 150% year-on-year to value the business at $172bn.

Even after four consecutive quarters of subscriber growth that comfortably beat forecasts, a single quarter miss for a company that needs to remain in constant high-growth mode has investors worrying about whether the Netflix peak has arrived.

“This was always going to cause jitters among investors from a company that’s spent so heavily on content in order to boost its subscriber numbers,” said Joshua Owen, a senior trader at Ayondo Markets. “The question for investors is whether this is a blip or something more structural within the video streaming landscape.”

The Netflix juggernaut relies on maintaining rapid global growth to continue paying for the content that is its lifeblood – $8bn on 700 original TV shows and 80 movies this year alone. If the slowdown in subscribers persists, the company’s already pressurised business model could break.

Netflix is on track to make $1bn in profits this year. But the company continues to spend much more than it makes and competition against rivals such as Amazon and Apple is intensifying, forcing budgets ever higher for the best content and talent to win new subscribers.

Netflix expects a negative free cash flow of between $3bn to $4bn this year, meaning the amount its spends on content, marketing and other costs in 2018 will exceed what it earns from subscriber revenue ($16bn) by at least $3bn.

In April, the company issued its fifth bond in three years to help finance its activities, adding $1.9bn in fresh debt.

Its debt mountain has surged from $300m in March 2016 to $6.5bn. And it has committed to spending $17bn to making and licensing TV and film content over the next few years.

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The California-based business that started out as a DVD rental outfit two decades ago has in recent years been viewed as a digital startup, making it hot stock with investors, which has, for the most part, kept it insulated from negative market sentiment and scrutiny.

“The company is still burning cash and piling up debt as it funds the development of its content library and thus customer acquisition,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell. “Even some 21 years after its creation, Netflix [still] cannot generate the cash that ultimately pays the bills.

“The question is whether Netflix is generating enough profit and cashflow to support its monster valuation.”

Many of us have eagerly ripped open a bag of our favorite chips, only to be struck with a tragic mix of disappoinment and resentment after it becomes clear that the promised bounty of vaguely potato-based goodness is nothing but a few sad looking shards clustered pathetically at the bottom of the bag.

Well Ross Hudgens, founder of content marketing company Siege Media, is here to save the day. Using a water displacement method to ensure accurate results, Ross presented his findings for Kitchen Cabinet Kings, whose post soon went viral as people were shocked, amused and thankful for this most interesting and relevant information.

Armed with this knowledge, consumers now know which brands offer the best bang for their buck, and can get rid of that chip on their shoulder. Scroll down to check it out for yourself, and let us know what you think in the comments!

Ever wondered how about the air to chip ratio of your favorite brands?

Here’s how people reacted

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Talentry, a startup based in Munich that has developed a “social recruitment and marketing platform,” has closed €6 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is Nauta Capital, the pan-European VC focused on SaaS, with participation from Rocket Internet’s GFC, Allgeier SE, and number of angel investors. I also understand that GFC previously backed Talentry’s €2 million seed round.

Relatively low-key to date, Talentry offers a SaaS to enable companies to utilise their employees’ social networks to help with recruitment. The platform powers employee referral and employee advocacy programs, including the ability for employees to easily share job openings and corporate content. The premise is that, although social recruitment is as old as recruitment itself, simply having employees post job openings on various social channels alone, is no longer going to cut it.

Instead, explained Talentry CEO Carl Hoffmann on a call last week, social recruitment combined with content marketing works much more effectively. For example, employees could share a company blog post about an upcoming product, which would also include relevant job postings. The landing pages generated by Talentry are personalised, too, so that the employee who shared the content is clearly signposted and the recruitment-related content can be further adapted for their audience accordingly.

More broadly, Hoffmann says that fierce competition for talent is changing the way companies recruit. This is seeing a marketing strategy comparable to winning customers. “To do this successfully — attracting candidates, building talent pools and nurturing them long-term — companies need the right technology,” he explains.

Talentry says it serves over 150 clients across all industries, including Henkel, Swiss Post, Vodafone, Axel Springer, and Universal Music Group. Meanwhile, the new funding will be used to develop further product features, such as a more powerful CRM for tracking recruitment leads, and to grow the team. Hoffmann says the company also plans to launch in international markets, including the U.K. and U.S., adding to the German-speaking countries it currently targets.

Guillem Sagué, who led the investment at Nauta Capital, says: “At Nauta we invest in capital-efficient global disruptors in the software space, and we believe Talentry has the potential to create a new software category focused on building and nurturing relationships with talented potential candidates at scale. As this is the first investment we made in Germany from our current €155 million fund this investment is the first building block of our German operations”.

In the era of fake news and controversies over how brands’ advertising — via programmatic platforms — unwittingly ends up alongside content with which they’d rather not be associated, Oracle has made an acquisition to beef up its ability to help customers with these marketing challenges.

The company has announced that it will acquire Grapeshot, a startup out of Cambridge, England, that has developed a platform to help ensure “brand safety”, along with solutions to help brands, agencies, publishers and ad platforms to match ads to more specific placements overall.

The startup will become a part of the Oracle Data Cloud, Oracle said, working specifically in the area of Audiences and Measurement, which already provides a number of other tools to marketers, such as data for custom segmented audiences.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed but one of the investors tells us it was in the multiple hundreds of millions of pounds. Conservatively assuming at least £200 million, this means Grapeshot has sold for at least $280 million; but the source said it would be safe to assume a higher multiple, so I’m now thinking it was for between $300 million and $400 million. However, another source said it was for around $150 million. Assuming both are “right” the higher number might be including an earn-out. Still trying to find out more.

In either case, it is a strong exit for the company that speaks both to how timely this issue is right now, and also the strength of Grapeshot’s technology and existing business. For some context, Pitchbook notes that Grapeshot’s last pre-money valuation was around $56 million (£40.2 million) in May of 2017, while Crunchbase notes that the company has raised only $22.4 million from investors that include IQ Capital Partners, Draper Esprit and Albion. It’s “an outstanding return”, said the investor.

Grapeshot, via its Contextual Intelligence Platform, says it works with some 5,000 marketers globally, covering some 38 billion programmatic ad impressions. It’s been growing at a rate of over 100 percent year-over-year, it says. It looks like it will continue to work with existing customers, who will in turn become potential targets for the cross-selling of other Oracle services.

The rise of Grapeshot and its acquisition by Oracle speaks to a growing challenge in the area of adtech and corresponding marketing technology: while programmatic advertising has largely become the norm across the web, there are some unintended consequences from all that automation.

For one, it’s harder to specifically match ads to content in every case — and this might potentially become even more difficult with the rise of stronger data protection and increased scrutiny on how are data is used for ad targeting. One of Grapeshot’s services helps marketers solve this with technology that helps match ads not just to basic sites, but to keywords on pages.

But in the worst-case scenarios, brands are finding their ads running alongside content that is outright damaging to their images. In a recent scandal, advertisers were forced to freeze some ads on YouTube when they were found to be running alongside videos of kids with obscene comments from viewers.

Ideally both for the brands and YouTube, the ads would have never been there to begin with — and that is the kind of outcome that Grapeshot (and now Oracle) is going to be helping achieve.

There are, of course, a lot more controls in place now to try to prevent situations like this, and products aimed at generally making it easier to match ads to content. Search giant (and YouTube owner) Google, the world’s biggest online advertising company, earlier this year launched a new AdSense product that uses machine learning to “read” content on specific pages to understand the context before it serves an ad to it.

The interesting thing about Grapeshot is that it’s working a layer back before this. By not being tied to any specific ad platform, Oracle has the potential to play a strong hand as an unbiased helper to customers to achieve the best results.

Oracle has made a number of acquisitions to expand its digital marketing and advertising solutions business, to tap into the rise of social media and also to compete better against Salesforce. They have included Compendium, Moat, Involver, Vitrue, Netsuite, Market2Lead and many more.

In the era of fake news and controversies over how brands’ advertising — via programmatic platforms — unwittingly ends up alongside content with which they’d rather not be associated, Oracle has made an acquisition to beef up its ability to help customers with these marketing challenges.

It has announced that it will acquire Grapeshot, a startup out of Cambridge, England, that has developed a platform to help ensure “brand safety”, along with solutions to help brands, agencies, publishers and ad platforms to match ads to more specific placements overall.

The startup will become a part of the Oracle Data Cloud, Oracle said, working specifically in the area of Audiences and Measurement, which already provides a number of other tools to marketers, such as data for custom segmented audiences.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed but we are trying to find out. According to Pitchbook, Grapeshot’s last post-money valuation was around $56 million (£40.2 million) in May of 2017. Crunchbase notes that the company has raised $22.4 million from investors that include IQ Capital Partners, Draper Esprit and Albion.

Grapeshot, via its Contextual Intelligence Platform, says it works with some 5,000 marketers globally, covering some 38 billion programmatic ad impressions. It’s been growing at a rate of over 100 percent year-over-year, it says. It looks like it will continue to work with existing customers, who will in turn become potential targets for the cross-selling of other Oracle services.

The rise of Grapeshot and its acquisition by Oracle speaks to a growing challenge in the area of adtech and corresponding marketing technology: while programmatic advertising has largely become the norm across the web, there are some unintended consequences from all that automation.

For one, it’s harder to specifically match ads to content in every case — and this might potentially become even more difficult with the rise of stronger data protection and increased scrutiny on how are data is used for ad targeting. One of Grapeshot’s services helps marketers solve this with technology that helps match ads not just to basic sites, but to keywords on pages.

But in the worst-case scenarios, brands are finding their ads running alongside content that is outright damaging to their images. In a recent scandal, advertisers were forced to freeze some ads on YouTube when they were found to be running alongside videos of kids with obscene comments from viewers.

Ideally both for the brands and YouTube, the ads would have never been there to begin with — and that is the kind of outcome that Grapeshot (and now Oracle) is going to be helping achieve.

There are, of course, a lot more controls in place now to try to prevent situations like this, and products aimed at generally making it easier to match ads to content. Search giant (and YouTube owner) Google, the world’s biggest online advertising company, earlier this year launched a new AdSense product that uses machine learning to “read” content on specific pages to understand the context before it serves an ad to it.

The interesting thing about Grapeshot is that it’s working a layer back before this. By not being tied to any specific ad platform, Oracle has the potential to play a strong hand as an unbiased helper to customers to achieve the best results.

Oracle has made a number of acquisitions to expand its digital marketing and advertising solutions business, to tap into the rise of social media and also to compete better against Salesforce. They have included Compendium, Moat, Involver, Vitrue, Netsuite, Market2Lead and many more.

In 2016, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation sent a letter to a fast-growing content marketing network called Revcontent. The nonprofit watchdog was concerned about the way some of Revcontent’s advertisers portrayed women. The network regularly ran ads for mail-order bride services, for example, or ones that featured close-ups of women’s breasts. “Revcontent was the fastest growing of the content advertising networks,” says Haley Halverson, vice president of advocacy and outreach at NCOSE. “so we thought it would be a good place to start.”

For eighteen months, Halverson got no response.

Then last fall, Revcontent’s founder and CEO John Lemp reached out for help reducing the racy ads. The times had changed, even for a web advertising in Florida. He credits the birth of his second daughter for his sudden desire to strip the racy ads from his network. He references the #MeToo movement as the reason for the startup’s expeditious wokeness. And sure those things count, but there’s an immediate business reason for Revcontent to position itself as clean well-lit place for web advertisers: as premium advertisers grow increasingly skittish about the material that surfaces adjacent to their brands on the web, choosing to lay off the cleavage shots is a marketing opportunity. So Lemp invited Halverson to visit the company’s Sarasota headquarters, learn how his business works, and help Revcontent figure out which ads exploit and degrade women.

Content advertising networks are among the web’s bottom feeders. It’s hard to get a sense of who the largest players are among these companies because the niche is so tiny not many services keep track, but there are at least a couple dozen. The most well-known of these networks are Outbrain and Taboola, but Revcontent has grown quickly. Polar, which is a content marketing platform for publishers, predicts this will be a $3.6 billion market by 2020. These companies serve up sponsored ads on the pages of publishers like Fast Company or TIME (or WIRED, which has an agreement with Outbrain) under a banner that identifies them as native advertising.

Nearly everything about this kind of content marketing is meant to trick a reader. It’s designed to look like actual stories, and often have salacious headlines like “A Teen Sent a Photo of Herself to the Wrong Number” and “Tom Selleck Makes Brave Statement About his Personal Life.” Sometimes the advertisers are other publishers that hope to recirculate their pieces in order to get more page views. Sometimes they’re advertisers who’ve purposefully designed ads that look and feel like editorial stories about their products. (Surely everyone has had the experience of clicking on that headline about Meghan Markle’s acne, only to discover it links to a skincare ad.) The networks usually share revenue with the publishers that host their ads.

Not Too Salacious

In recent years, as the advertising industry has rejiggered its strategy to compete with Facebook and Google, publishers have increasingly turned to content advertising networks as a new source of revenue. But in a crowded advertising space, these networks are fighting for scraps of attention and desperation often causes them to turn to questionable tactics. I stumbled across a Revcontent module on InfoWars, for example, that included the headlines “Warning from God Discovered in Human DNA” and “Malia Obama was Spotted in her Brand New Car and it’s Disgusting!”

Therein lies the tension: in their attempt to get you to click, content advertising networks are incentivized to embrace the most outrageous, attention-getting aspects of the content floating around the web. In late 2016, these companies came under fire for fueling fake news. Even as Google and Facebook said they were taking steps to remove propaganda from their sites, purveyors of misinformation with names like NationalReport.net and TheRightists.com were partnering with these networks to recirculate their content. The networks tightened their guidelines for who qualified as a publishing partner, and they stepped up their efforts to screen their advertisers. Even so, the widgets containing their ads still slip through. After the Parkland, Florida shooting in February, for example, the website Infowars was thrust into the spotlight when founder Alex Jones published a video saying the student gun activists were actors. Both Taboola and Revcontent were showing ads on Infowars, according to Digiday. Taboola pulled its advertising, but as of April 2, Revcontent continues to partner with Infowars. The company says it wants to work with independent partners to help determine what content should be removed.

Content advertising networks are incentivized to embrace the most outrageous, attention-getting aspects of the content floating around the web

Facing increased scrutiny, content marketing networks must deal with a similar set of conundrums as larger platforms, like Facebook and Google: namely, how to moderate what publishers they work with and what ads get shown on their content modules. Which publishers are spreading misleading information, and which are simply embracing extreme and unpopular points of view? It’s a tricky difference to negotiate at scale. “Sometimes what seems appropriate to some, seems very wrong to others,” wrote Taboola CEO Adam Singolda in a 2016 blog post addressing fake news. “This can be a ‘grey’ area.”

That may be so, but premium advertisers are also becoming more skittish about placing their ads alongside inappropriate content of all sorts. More than a third of them are concerned their ads will land next to hate speech, according to recent research by Digiday and GumGum, and 17 percent are concerned their ads will land next to pornography. And now that the industry has started to tackle fake news, it’s negotiating grayer areas—like policing ads that portray women inappropriately. On March 28, Singolda published a blog post entitled “1000 Ways We Are Cleaning Up the Internet” in which he said the company had removed 1000 ads it deemed racy, saying it “will represent a few million dollars of lost revenue in 2018, but it’s without a doubt, worth it.” Singolda said Taboola employs 30 people to review content, and plans to add another 15 this year. He says the company is also adding an option for readers to flag content they deem racy. (Like Lemp, Singolda credits recent fatherhood for his embrace of this issue.)

The problem with this approach is that the definition of racy material is far more subjective than that of pornography. Google the word, and the first definition that pops up reads: “lively, entertaining, and typically mildly titillating sexually.” In an environment where sex sells (at least as much as fake conspiracy theories, if not more), it’s a sizable challenge to figure out what constitutes appropriate above-board imagery, without exploiting its subjects.

More than a third of premium advertisers are concerned their ads will land next to hate speech

This is a question Lemp didn’t feel qualified to answer last fall when he enlisted the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) to help. Halverson’s organization has been working to strip businesses of pornography since 1962, and it has a particularly high bar for what passes as appropriate. Its victories include getting Walmart to remove Cosmo from its checkout aisles and getting large hotel chains like Hyatt and Hilton to remove on-demand pornography from guest rooms.

After meeting with Revcontent’s compliance team to learn how its process for vetting ads worked, Halverson made some immediate suggestions. The network relies on technology to scan its images, and it also has human reviewers that screen for problems. She suggested Revcontent remove all the mail-order-bride advertisers from its network immediately. “That’s a hair away from a prostitution transaction,” she says. She also encouraged the company to look more closely at the relationship between an image and its headline. There was an ad, for example, which featured First Lady Melania Trump. “It said ‘these 35 photos will have you wondering if she’s First Lady material,’ and was cropped so you’d have only her bare shoulders and breasts,” says Halverson. This is the kind of thing she says the site shouldn’t publish.

In March, satisfied that Revcontent had undertaken adequate efforts to remove all sexually explicit content, the watchdog provided its endorsement to the company. Halverson says she plans to send letters to Taboola and Outbrain on behalf of NCOSE shortly, and hopes to have a similar impact.

But while Revcontent’s advertisements may be much improved, it doesn’t control the stories its publishing partners produce. Even as I discussed the company’s work with Charlie Terenzio, who recently started as a brand manager at Revcontent, an image cropped up of a woman in a low-cut tank top and jean shorts, legs open suggestively. How’d that get through, I asked him? He explained the module I saw was part of a different technology product publishers used to recirculate their own content. In other words, Revcontent can only police its advertisers. If publishers choose to rely on risqué photos of women, it’s on them.

Correction at 10:30 a.m. on 4/3/2018: An earlier version of this story misspelled the Revcontent CEO's name. It is John Lemp.

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